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The air in the Atlas dome was thick and heavy, cloyingly sweet, and Rhys breathed it in as he pressed himself against the cool metal plates of the floor, trying to bring his fever down. He opened his mouth to taste it, the scent tangible on his tongue, like the thick nectar of Sasha’s flower, or like incense. His head was heavy on his neck even as it felt like it would float right off his shoulders into orbit, up where Helios had been. Maybe it was just that he lacked the spine to lift it.
He rolled his head to the side and rested his bandaged temple against the floor. The constant thrum of the missing port intensified, satisfyingly sharp, the pain cutting for an instant through the haze before easing as quickly as it had started. Rhys supposed he should consider himself lucky that the infection had only set into his shoulder and not into the delicate, scarred, expensive cybernetic tissue of his brain. In the echoing expanse of the Atlas facility, it was hard to feel that anything about this was lucky.
Rhys was alone, and the antibiotics had been a little expired, and the fever reducers had been ineffective, and the scent of drakefruit was under his nails, in his pores, embedded in his DNA. He’d been there for so long, salvaging the materials he’d need to put himself together again, if he ever wanted to. Through the haze of the fever, it was impossible to tell exactly how long. His internal clock was broken, and it could have been hours or months or years. He couldn’t remember. There were a lot of things he couldn’t remember lately.
At least he still remembered Vaughn, and Vaughn’s watch, keeping perfect time wherever he was, after he’d escaped from Vallory and her goons before they’d realized the plan had gone tits-up and that Vaughn was now useless collateral. Rhys laughed softly, but the sound of it was smothered by the dense air and the emptiness. Rhys was good at deluding himself, and this was a good one. He’d keep it close for as long as he could, sink his teeth into it until they broke.
Rhys couldn’t even remember his own name, but he’d remember Vaughn for as long as he lasted. He owed him that much.
The name thing bothered Rhys the most. He wasn’t entirely sure he had one. He remembered his first name, of course, because that’s what people called him, what he called himself. But he was reasonably certain that he’d had a couple of others, before. If not a middle name, then a last name, certainly. People had last names to differentiate themselves, to bind themselves together, to show a history and an origin. Hugo Vasquez had had a full name, once, but even Vasquez had only ever called him Rhys.
Athena. Vallory. August. Sasha. Fiona. Maybe it was something about the planet itself, cleaving them all in half, paring them down to their base elements, sloughing off everything but the life support, the absolute necessities. History didn’t matter to Pandora. Who you had been before was irrelevant. Pandora was a rebirth and a death all at once, a death of self, a death of history. Rhys was baptized in the sweat pouring from his skin and the blood leeching through his bandages, and he wondered what his new self would be, for however long it lasted.
Rhys the Company Man.
Rhys the Atlas CEO.
Rhys the Destroyer-of-Helios-and-Everyone-on-It
Handsome–
It wasn’t just Pandorans that lacked full names. Maybe Pandorans were just born without them. Maybe they weren’t lacking anything at all, really, because they’d never needed a second name. Maybe Pandora hadn’t chewed them up and spit them out new and crying and afraid into the world. Maybe that was just him. Alone. Not a baptism, but last rights.
Jack had taken more than his fair share of Rhys when he’d forced him out.
Rhys pressed his face into the floor just to feel that single arc of pain. At least there was that. With the pain at least he could prove that he was still lasting, still moving, still breathing. The floor was hot and wet, and he should’ve moved but his eyes were aching and radiating heat and the pain and discomfort were better than nothing. He breathed in deep and held the syrupy air in his lungs, hot like steam, fermenting, flavored with incense and nectar and drakefruit. He was so sick of drakefruit. The exhale was a sob more than a breath.
What he wouldn’t give for a human voice. For anything to remind him that he was still real, that even if he couldn’t remember his history or his surname he was still just Rhys. He was desperate to keep the name that he still had for however much longer he lasted. He needed someone to say it.
The air had stifled even the sound of the far-off Pandoran wildlife, the only noise his own shaky sobs, and even those were quiet. He needed his name so badly, he needed a voice, any voice. He wanted Vaughn, who always said his name with faith and trust and care. Yvette had said his name with affection and teasing, but most recently with contempt and coldness. He’d take even that. He was desperate enough that he wished for Sasha or Fiona and their exasperation and sincerity and sarcasm, forgetting for a moment that sick, painful feeling in his guts when he’d discovered the pyrite falsity of their sincerity, writ large on the retreating turbines of the caravan he had almost started thinking of as home.
Jack, at least, had never left him like that. The thought oozed its way through the fever, slow and curling like honey. Jack had understood that loneliness, that emptiness. Had feared it. Had said his name with pleading eyes and a crack in his voice, a voice that had held thousands in its sway. He’d held Rhys in his sway. In the face of the emptiness and the nothingness Rhys could even now feel pressing down around him, Jack had begged to be spared. Handsome Jack had dropped to his knees and begged for a lowly middle-manager that couldn’t even remember his own name. Jack understood more than anyone else did, maybe even more than Vaughn. Rhys wanted to hear that voice again, to be pulled under its tide, angry and disgusted and defeated and gleeful and desperate. The rise and fall of Jack’s words, the roll of Rhys’s name over his tongue, his sharp-eyed focus as he said it, echoing through his head, the room, an entire space station. He needed it more badly than he’d ever needed anything, more badly than he needed the swollen air or the antibiotics or even the godforsaken drakefruit.
It was times like these that Rhys knew he’d made the right decision, killing Jack. The temptation was just too much to bear, and Rhys was good at deluding himself.
Rhys had never hated someone as much as he hated himself in these moments, for leaving Jack in tiny crushed pieces of circuitry on the floor of his shattered empire, where Pandora’s winds would sweep him up and grind him into so much misshapen blue sand. For missing him. Jack deserved everything he got but no one deserved to be alone, floating in that liminal space between one life and the next, trapped forever in emptiness. Killing him was a mercy, compared to that.
When Rhys finally stood up he had stopped crying and packed away all the parts of himself he didn’t need to think about. He hugged the wall, wobbly with fever, every step lurching like he was missing the last step on the stairs. It was time to change his bandages and take the next dose of slightly-expired antibiotics. The humid air clung to him like silk, his wet skin glimmering in the low lighting. In the breeze he stirred with his fumbling, he began to shiver. A good sign for the infection. He wiped himself down with a clean wet cloth and rewrapped his shoulder and aggravated port, then hydrated and ate as much drakefruit as he could stomach. He’d need the energy. Maybe one day he’d even come to enjoy the sensation of the tiny seeds sticking between his teeth. Despite everything, he didn’t want to die, even if he deserved it. Even if he could barely sleep at night, he had to try to at least take some good out of the whole mess. He had a debt that needed to be repaid.
Rhys settled heavily onto the cot in the corner, burying himself in blankets to ride it all out. He pulled the memory of Vaughn around him like a well-loved quilt and breathed in, deeply. The smell was becoming familiar, like the weight of the air in his lungs. Under the blankets, his oversensitive skin itched like the sand of Pandora had seeded itself in his pores, twining around his blood vessels and circuitry. He fell asleep to the sound of his own breathing, Pandora itself burrowing deep and dreaming of what he might become.